Pudding

Nobody is reading beer blogs on Christmas Day so it doesn't really matter what I put here. How about I throw you some weird Norwegian stuff that no sane person would ever buy?

The surrealists at Amundsen are responsible for this lot, and first out is a "pastry sour" called Root Beer Float, presumably intended to taste like that American dessert. I've never had one, so I can't judge it on accuracy. It looks well, though: a dark purple with lots of bright pink froth. The aroma, perhaps unsurprisingly, is intensely sweet, reminding me of those cake-like concoctions on which Omnipollo forged its reputation a decade or so ago. It doesn't smell like any particular sweet thing, however, just general sweetness. The flavour is the same and I did my best to pick it apart. Cherry and blueberry are listed in the ingredients, and there's a certain tartness from the latter, and a donut-filling effect from the former. In the middle there's what I'm guessing is supposed to be the root beer's sarsaparilla, herbal and spicy, but in reality it's a harsh, chemical note: jarring and making the whole thing difficult drinking. The gummy fruit flavours, intensified by lactose, create a lasting after-effect. I think you really need to be a diehard fan of the pastry sour to get on with this one. It has all the typical features, and ramped up to what I would call Omnipollo levels, and I don't mean that as a compliment.

That left me more than a little apprehensive about the follow-up, a beer in a similar style, called 10th Birthday Cake Celebration which is a "raspberry and passionfruit tart topped with whipped marshmallow and coconut cream". Remember when this blog was about beer? This is one of a series of collaborations, here with English brewer Pastore. It's a pale pink in the glass; opaque with floaty bits, looking like a strawberry smoothie, which the brewery would likely take as positive feedback. It smells of fresh blended fruit too, and the passionfruit is to the fore, as one might expect. Like the last one, this is 6% ABV, but there's no lactose, so it's altogether more light and palatable. The raspberry tastes like real fruit, with the woody crispness of raspberry seed. Second-most prominent is the coconut, adding a gooey suncream effect that's nearly unpleasant, but isn't quite. That leaves a tropical tang of passionfruit to bring up the rear, while the marshmallow is nowhere in sight, I'm happy to say. It's a busy combination, but it works surprisingly well. There's a summery joy about the whole thing that wasn't in the previous one. Silly beer can go either way, and this is one of the good ones. Let's have a decider.

Dessert is a "salted caramel choc chip cookie stout" with the unlikely name of Ashes to Ashes, and containing none of the things listed in the description; the sweetness provided solely by lactose. I'm not sure I believe that, though I would have thought a Norwegian would get the facts right. It is indeed incredibly sweet, although I don't find that as problematic in a 10.5% ABV imperial stout, as against a fruited "sour". There's a bit of coffee roast in the aroma, suggesting the residual sugar doesn't get everything its own way, but from the first sip, it's plain that it does. Milk chocolate meets a drier kind of caramel sweetness, tasting to me almost exactly like a Cadbury Crunchie bar. Don't look for much complexity beyond this, just a pink marshmallow effect on the end. Although it's not alcoholically hot, it's still a beer to take time over, just because the extreme sweetness takes a moment or two to process. You might consider blending it with a lighter dry stout, or splitting the 33cl can. I respect what it is and how it has gone about that, but it's not really the sort of beer for me. Let's call this a draw.

The modern-day beer scene gets a lot of very fair flack for producing vast numbers of daft beer-adjacent sugarbombs like this. It's certainly not what I signed up for when I undertook to drink all the different beers in the world on your behalf. I feel it's important to check in every now and then, but I couldn't see myself spending any significant amount of time in this sticky corner of the beer universe.